shoujo manga, ramen and (mainly) other things

Why I don’t watch dubs anymore…

I’ve always prefered watching anime dubbed in English, over subbed, but as I began catching up with newer and newer releases, dubs for the shows I was watching eventually became harder and harder to find (although they have dubs now, Maid Sama and Skip Beat! weren’t exactly the hottest new things to watch in 2010…).

On top of that, the (arguably) higher quality of the Japanese dubbing and my (still limited) knowledge of the Japanese language made me much more picky as to what was acceptable, name pronunciations being the most common gripes. Eventually, I just stopped watching dubbed anime almost all together with very few exceptions.

I was just too impatient to wait for a license announcement (that may never come for some) just so that I could wait another six months to a year for the DVD to come out and I’d then have to save up to buy and ultimately may sound bad anyway. I wanted my anime now, as soon as it came out in Japan (or even faster, if I had it my way).

The final nail in the coffin for my interest in dubs was surprisingly the introduction of ‘Broadcast Dubs’. I was already interested in both Psycho-Pass 2 and Laughing Under the Clouds and so you would think that my complaints about the speed of dub releases would be at least be resolved.

Unfortunately, these dubs were what I could only describe as horrific in quality. Even when compared to other shows with lower quality dubs, the script and voice directing were simply too rushed to be acceptable.

Why am I writing about this now? I recently discovered that the Simuldub program (or whatever they’re calling it now) has actually been producing some decent quality stuff for a while now, like Assassination Classroom, Snow White with Red Hair and, more recently, Classroom of the Elite, to name a few of the now many shows they’ve been dubbing.

Despite the dubs now being what I would consider to be acceptable quality, I still don’t feel quite right watching an anime dubbed. I’d still happily watch Ouran High School Host Club (an anime that, to this day, I have never seen in Japanese with subtitles) in English, but for more recent shows like Classroom of the Elite and Chronos Rulers, it always just feels…off…Maybe it’s the blatantly fake English accents, or poorly pronounced words and phrases, but I just can sit through a full episode anymore.

Weirdly enough, I’ve always played games (particularly JRPGs) with the English dub whenever possible this entire time but how can you not when the voices of Chrom, Phoenix Wright and Roy Mustang are all in the cast? I guess it’s because I tend to find that video game dubs tend to be better that anime dubs, but hey, that just opinion. Maybe because games and anime different enough media for such a thing to influence the viewer/player’s experience…
I’m not trying to ignite a “dubs vs subs” war but I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s weird preferences or traumatic experiences with this kind of thing…

4 thoughts on “Why I don’t watch dubs anymore…”

That’s actually the reason why I originally prefered watching dubs, since it meant I could do other work at the same time. Writing a history essay while reading subtitles is much more difficult than you’d think.